Friday, October 28, 2016

Bad to the Bone: A Vote to Anyone but Trump is a Vote for The Clinton Criminal Enterprise

The Cold Clinton Reality

Why isn’t the IRS investigating the Clinton Foundation?

Main Street Columnist Bill McGurn on how the former president used his foundation as a vehicle for personal enrichment. Photo credit: Zuma Press.

Hillary and Bill Clinton are asking for a third term in the White House, and voters who want to know what this portends should examine the 12-page memo written by a Clinton insider that was hacked and published Wednesday by WikiLeaks. This is the cold, hard reality of the Clinton political-business model.

Longtime Clinton aide Doug Band wrote the memo in 2011 to justify himself to lawyers at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett who were reviewing his role and conducting a governance review of the Clinton Foundation at the insistence of Chelsea Clinton.In an email two weeks earlier, also published on WikiLeaks, Ms. Clinton said her father had been told that Mr. Band’s firm Teneo was “hustling” business at the Clinton Global Initiative, a regular gathering of the wealthy and powerful that is ostensibly about charitable activity.

Poor innocent Chelsea. Bill and Hillary must never have told her what business they’re in. If she had known, she would never have hired a blue-chip law firm to sweep through the hallways of the Clinton Foundation searching for conflicts of interest. Instead of questioning Mr. Band’s compensation, she would have pleaded with him never to reveal the particulars of his job in writing.

But she didn’t, and so Mr. Band went ahead and described the “unorthodox nature” of his work while emphasizing his determination to help “protect the 501(c)3 status of the Foundation.” That’s the part of the tax code that has allowed the Clinton Foundation to remain tax-exempt on the premise that it is dedicated to serving humanity.

Mr. Band graciously copied John Podesta, then adviser to the board, who would eventually become Hillary’s campaign chief. His helpful reply was to suggest that Mr. Band “strip the defensive stuff out” and later “go through the details and how they have helped WJC” [ William Jefferson Clinton].

The Band memo reveals exactly what critics of the Clintons have long said: They make little distinction between the private and public aspects of their lives, between the pursuit of personal enrichment, the operation of a nonprofit, and participation in U.S. politics.

Mr. Band writes that he and his colleague Justin Cooper “have, for the past ten years, served as the primary contact and point of management for President Clinton’s activities—which span from political activity (e.g., campaigning on behalf of candidates for elected office), to business activity (e.g., providing advisory services to business entities with which he has a consulting arrangement), to Foundation activity.”

This excerpt and all the potential conflicts it describes, plus Chelsea’s warning about business “hustling” at foundation events, would seem more than ample cause to trigger an IRS audit of the foundation. For that matter, why aren’t the IRS and prosecutors already on the case? Any normal foundation has to keep records to show it is separating its nonprofit activity from any for-profit business.

Mr. Band’s memo confirms that donors were not seeking merely to help the sick and the poor. He explains that the Clinton Foundation had “engaged an array of fundraising consultants” over the past decade but “these engagements have not resulted in significant new dollars for the Foundation.” In other words, it wasn’t working as a conventional charity.

Mr. Band then explains how he and his Teneo partner Declan Kelly had to carry the fundraising load, and did so by packaging foundation solicitations with other services such as a meeting with Bill Clinton, $450,000 speeches or strategic advice. Many of the donations, from U.S. companies like Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical and foreign firms like UBS and Barclays, occurred while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

Why exactly were donors writing checks? The Band memo makes clear that donations untied to additional Clinton or Teneo services weren’t all that appealing to potential supporters. This is significant, because the large grant-making foundations in the U.S. are almost entirely run by Clinton voters. So you know they weren’t turned off by the brand name. They’d contribute more if they thought they were also buying goodwill and influence with a current Secretary of State and a potential future President.

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We don’t applaud WikiLeaks or the theft of information, and these hacks deserve a firm U.S. government response. But the emails are public and they will confirm for many Americans their worst suspicions about the people who run their government.

It’s also worth noting that in the vast digital trove of Mr. Podesta’s stolen emails we haven’t noticed emails from Mrs. Clinton. Perhaps they don’t exist. But American voters shouldn’t worry merely about the emails released before the election. What emails or memos exist that these hackers, Russian or not, could be withholding for leverage after the election with another President Clinton?

The Clinton campaign has suggested that Donald Trump has praised Vladimir Putinbecause the Russian has something on the Republican. The question is what do any number of possible bad actors know about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s mixing of business, charity and politics?

If there were still any doubt, the latest WikiLeaks disclosure makes it undeniable: Everything we’ve heard about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s sleazy drive to enrich themselves is true.

In a way, we have daughter Chelsea to thank for the revelation.

It was her suspicion that her father’s cronies were using their Clinton Foundation connections to “hustle business” for themselves that led to an in-house legal review.

And in a 2011 memo to the review team, former presidential aide Doug Band openly boasted about how he’d raised millions for the foundation from his business clients — and even more for Bill Clinton personally.

In fact, Band’s 13-page memo actually described the arrangement he’d set up as “Bill Clinton Inc.” — “dedicating myself” to helping the Clintons use their government service to feather their own nest.

And what a gravy train: Band’s clients at his Teneo consulting firm were pressed to give millions to the foundation — and millions more to Bill.

At that point, Teneo had raised $8 million for the foundation and $3 million in paid speeches for Bill. Plus, Band boasted, it had also set up “more than $50 million in for-profit” business deals for the ex-president, with contracts worth $66 million more.

And that doesn’t even include loads of “in-kind” freebies, like vacations and private jets.

Band denied profiting personally from these deals (apart from all the high-priced business he got from his Clinton connection, that is). He would even later whine about his inability to cash in like Bill.

The foundation claims there was no unsavory link between its donors and Hillary’s job as secretary of state. Yet other email dumps and press investigations show beyond a doubt that giving to Clinton causes could win you face time with the secretary, help placing people in State Department jobs — and even preferential treatment in lucrative Haiti relief work.

Not to mention all the suspicious favors outlined in “Clinton Cash” and in other reporting since.

Even a foundation internal investigator concluded that corporations were “paying Teneo for connections with Clinton” — not to mention with the secretary of state and potential future president.

Meanwhile, when top Hillary aide Huma Abedin needed help making ends meet (her hubby’s career having nose-dived), she wound up with her own Teneo job as well as a foundation salary — even as she remained at State.

Hmm: Abedin’s husband, Anthony Weiner, would later brag of how easy he found it to earn big money in private-sector consulting.

This whole circle of enrichment was a one-hand-washes-the-other arrangement. All nice and cozy — and mutually lucrative.

What more proof do we need that as far as Bill and Hillary Clinton are concerned, the rules don’t apply to them?

You don’t need to rise much above being a simpleton to recognize obvious criminal corruption in Clinton style governance and you don’t need to be more nuanced than a two by four to the forehead to notice that the Clintons are trash.

Hillary, in an attempt to channel her inner Nixon,is trying to hang on for another two weeks to gain the presidency so she can get her hands on the DOJ and FBI and force her own 'Saturday Night Massacre' to protect herself.

Jason Chaffetz says it won't make any difference. In her first four years, Hillary will be too busy responding to Judiciary Committee investigations to get anything else accomplished.

In an hour or so, Obama will be speaking for Hillary at an event in Florida. Any bets on what he will say about this latest clusterf**k?

There is no doubt his has seen over the most corrupt/incompetent administration in history. Will he go to her defense or will he be worried with being seen as an unindicted co-conspirator what with his meetings with Creamer and lying about knowing about the server.

Hillary’s going to lose the election to Trump because the perv sexting teen girls with his hand down his pants might have had classified information from his wife on the same phone? My God — this is the most Clinton thing ever. With 11 days to go, we have reached peak Clinton.

You need to get out of the house once in a while, Quirk-O, not just this fire hydrant stuff.

Right, while you are sitting around waiting to steal some old ladies seat at the nickel slots and listening to some old Spanish American war vet, I am spending an hour or two walking the 4500 acre Stony Creek Metropark with my dog.

WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement officials said on Friday that a trove of emails described by the F.B.I. director as pertinent to the now-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server were discovered on a computer belonging to Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton.

In a stunning letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, and that they “appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” It remained unclear, however, if the emails were sent from Mrs. Clinton’s private server, which has already been thoroughly examined by the F.B.I.

The new development in the saga over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information rocked the presidential campaign less than two weeks before the election, leaving Mrs. Clinton’s team scrambling for explanations and bolstering the spirits of Donald J. Trump after a wave of controversies and Republican defections led many to write him off.

“We are calling the F.B.I to release all the information that it has,” Mrs. Clinton said in an evening news conference that took issue with Mr. Comey for making the disclosure 11 days before the election. “Let’s get it out.”

The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case — one federal official said they numbered in the tens of thousands.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.